Apple Messiah Steve Jobs famously said that if people wanted to view porn on their mobile, then they should buy an Android. What he failed to understand was that made owning an Android phone much more attractive than the iPhone. Jobs said that he thought Apple had a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone”.
However, Cook appears to have worked out that Apple's target market is not right-wing neo-conservative Christians in the US bible belt, but young upwardly mobile kids in cities who have more money than sense and know little about technology. The latter market does not regard porn as something evil unless their mum sees their browser history (or they see it on their mum's browser history).
In an interview on MSNBC, Cook talked about how the company reviewed and approved every app offered in the iPhone App Store and rejected those containing porn.
"What you sell in that store says something about you," he said, and Apple chooses not to offer that material. But then he added: "It doesn't mean that you can't use an iPhone to go to your browser and go to some porn site, if you want to do that, but —"
He said he was comfortable with people using an iPhone to look at pornography — an opinion that represents a change of tone from the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' well-known dislike of adult entertainment content.
While Cook's line looks a little more permissive, Apple's longtime prohibition on controversial or offensive content in the App Store has not gone away. He added: "it is not what we want to put in our store. We want kids to go to the store, right?"
Cook's full quote was: "But I'm just saying that it's not what we want to put in our store. We want kids to go to the store, right, because kids — there's a lot of learning, education apps in the store. And so, we've always done that. We've worked for the music industry to code things explicit, and so a parent could say, "I don't want my child listening to explicit content." We make sure all the movies are coded in such a way where you can say, "I only want my child looking at G movies," or whatever, or we have a parental control around apps. You can say, "I don't want them on these certain apps." And so, this is something we've always felt really responsible for."
